Semua Bab Forbidden Under the Blood Moon: Bab 381 - Bab 390

POV: WREN THORNE“Mama, you cannot go like this. Your hands are shaking, the ring keeps singing, and the water will tell every grey cloak where you are the moment you leave. Take my stone. Please. Take it before you go.”Tansy stood barefoot on the cold flagstones in her nightgown, holding out one small closed fist. Her eyes were red from crying and furious about it.I knelt. “Tansy, love, you should be in bed.”“You are leaving.” She said it like an accusation. “Papa left. Now you leave. Everybody leaves and the Hearth goes quiet.”“Papa did not leave. Papa was taken.”“It is the same quiet.”I had no answer. She was three and a half years old, and she had just said the truest thing anyone had said all night.Hesper limped between us, her stick tapping the floor, and set a bundle on the bench. Grey felted wool, thick as a winter blanket. “Give me the ring, Sparrow.”“I need it for the north postern.”“You need it closed, and wrapped, and not looked at.” She took my hand and slid the

POV: WREN THORNE“I never received your letter, Ivy. Not one word of it. But there are forty grey cloaks in my courtyard who have been polishing their boots for you since sundown, and they asked me to leave this postern door unlocked.”Edric said it in a whisper, with his lantern shuttered to a single slit. He was a broad, weathered man with a scar through one eyebrow and the stiff look of someone who had not slept in a week. He stood in the north postern of Marlhold with the door half open behind him, and the dark behind him smelled of woodsmoke and tallow.Ivy had gone white. “That is not possible. I wrote it myself. I sealed it, and I put it in the river for the moon to carry.”“Ivy.” Edric’s face softened. “Nobody in my lifetime has sent a letter by river. The river does not run to Marlhold. It runs north, to the moon seat.”For a moment nobody spoke. The wind pushed at my cloak. The pebble was cold in my fist.“So the moon carried it north,” I said slowly. “And somebody there rea

POV: WREN THORNE“Please do not scream. I know whose ring that is, because the guards laughed about it all week, and I know what they plan. They are not holding me to trap my father. They are holding me to trap you.”The voice came from behind an iron door at the end of the passage. There was a slot in it no wider than a hand. Behind the slot, in the dark, I saw the pale shape of a face and one bright, tired eye.Lucan had already lifted a heavy ring of keys from a hook in the guard alcove. His fingers shook so badly that the keys rang like tiny bells. Ronan caught his wrist and held it steady, and Lucan gave him a look of such gratitude that I had to turn away.“The third key,” Lucan whispered. “My father marks them with notches. Three cuts for the lower cells.”The lock turned with a clunk. The door swung inward on a cold small room with a straw pallet and a bucket and a tallow candle stub guttering in a saucer. A woman sat against the far wall with her knees drawn up. She was perha

POV: WREN THORNE“Those are my names, Luna. Every voice in that courtyard is a family I hunted, and they are all calling me by name. I cannot make my legs move. Please. I cannot make my legs move.”Ronan stood in the drain mouth with his spear hanging from his hand, grey in the face, and I had never seen a man look so small.We had come up out of the cellar the long way, through the old chapel and the sheep yard, with Mara carried between Ivy and Lucan and my wool bundle against my ribs. Edric’s winter ale had done its work. The grey cloaks in the courtyard had grown loud and lazy by the fires. And around them, pale against the stone, the borrowed dead had risen.They were not frightening to look at. That was the worst part. They looked like a village at dusk. An old woman with a shawl. A boy with a wooden sword. A man in a farmer’s coat with a lantern. Dozens of them, standing in a loose ring around the yard, and every one of them was calling the same thing, softly, over and over, in

POV: WREN THORNE“Do not call his name, Luna. Do not touch the ring, and do not set one foot on those planks. I know what a woman does when she sees her husband alive, and I am begging you not to do it.”Ivy had hold of my sleeve with both hands. Her face was white and wet.We had ridden all night with Mara wrapped in Ronan’s cloak on the saddle in front of him, and we had come over a high shoulder of rock at the first grey light. The ground fell away at our feet. Before us lay a gorge so deep that the river at the bottom was only a thread of silver, and across it, swaying in the wind, hung a single long rope bridge. Mist rolled along it like breath.On the far side of the gorge, tiny against the cliff, two figures were running.One was old and bent, with a grey cloak. The other was tall. He moved like a man dragging an invisible weight, his hands bound in front of him, and even from here, even across that vast cold air, I knew the set of his shoulders better than my own face.“Kade,”